


Achoo

by pprfaith



Series: Micro Wishlist 2019 [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: wishlist_fic, Fluff, Found Family, M/M, Not Beta Read, Prompt Fic, Sick Stiles Stilinski, Sickness, Timestamp, adopted family, craft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21888379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Stiles is not sick. Stiles does not have time to be sick.
Relationships: Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Series: Micro Wishlist 2019 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576723
Comments: 53
Kudos: 851





	Achoo

**Author's Note:**

> For pan2fel, who asked for HYS!verse, sick Stiles and Peter and the kids playing nurse. I feel like Peter isn’t nearly as frazzled as you probably wanted, but at this point, he’s been raising three kids for several years and with Stiles almost as long so, probably, the only thing that still frazzles him are fires and Cora swinging from the chandelier in the front room. So.

+

Stiles is not sick. 

Stiles does not have time to be sick. 

He worked all week because it’s finals and Mason and Liam needed time off, spent his evenings frantically crocheting a blanket for Baby McCall 2.0 that he neglected for the past seven months and now it’s Saturday and he has shit to do. Like clean the house, take out the kids, do the books for the store (by that he means sort out the pile of receipts he collects every month and ferry it over to Lydia’s with an expensive bottle of wine), buy groceries and maybe get in a little sleep because even his ADHD pretty much gave the ghost on Thursday evening and just begged for a nap. 

Hyper focus has been the driving force in his life since he figured out how to turn it from ‘oh butterfly’ to ‘oh, making a living’ and seriously, even that part of him feels exhausted. He didn’t know that was _possible_. 

It’s been a hard week and it’s not over, yet.

So Stiles is not sick. 

“So who exactly has been sniffling and coughing in my face all night?” Peter demands, acerbically from the bathroom doorway, watching Stiles attempt to brush his teeth without hacking up a lung.

“Wuu-wahh,” Stiles answers, promptly, spits, coughs and then repeats, “Burglar. Poor guy probably came down with something while aiming for the good silver.”

“We don’t have good silver. At the rate our youngest is going, we soon won’t even have dishes that aren’t made from plastic.”

Cora saw angry people throwing dishes on TV. No-one ever said she doesn’t recognize a good plan when she sees one. 

Stiles gives up on making his mouth taste less like death, spits, rinses, spins to grab his shirt off the edge of the bathtub and almost falls into it, headfirst. 

Peter grabs him at the last second to preserve his beautiful face.

“Whoa,” Stiles mutters, rubbing his forehead. “Dizzy.”

“That,” his darling husband announces as he swats away his hand to feel his forehead himself, “would be your clogged up sinuses throwing off your balance and also, the fact that you _have the flu_.”

“Do not.”

Peter growls. “Say that five times fast without coughing and I’ll believe you. I won’t even mention your fever again.”

Stiles slumps. 

+

Half an hour later, he’s back in bed with a box of tissues and a mug of tea, as well as all the flu meds Peter managed to scrounge from around the house. Considering they have three children and Alli has allergies, it’s a lot.

And it’s not even all for children, either. 

Peter piles another afghan on top of Stiles, passes him the remote for the TV and his phone and strictly orders, “Stay.”

“This is overkill.”

“The operative word in that sentence being ‘kill’.”

“I’ll walk it off.”

“The children, who you will infect, won’t. Do you want three sick children, Stiles? Do you?!”

“Don’t be a drama llama,” Stiles mutters, turtling into the bottommost blanket. “Laura never gets sick. Germs are afraid of her. So it’ll only be two sick children.”

Peter just gives him a flat look. “No.”

+

The kids pop up in the doorway an hour later, Cora first, then Derek, then Laura, carrying a precariously tilting tray.

“We brought yummies!” Cora announces, and almost manages to escape her brother’s quick grip on her hoodie as she tries to launch into the room. 

Derek pulls her sideways, while Laura enters and places the tray at the end of the bed before scurrying out again with an apologetic, “Sorry, but I’m not getting your yuck!”

“I’m not sick!”

He sneezes. 

Derek snorts. 

Cora wriggles and points, “Eat, Pops, they’re get-well yummies!”

Since Stiles tends to feed the kids candy when they’re sick, because it’s all they’ll eat and at least it makes them happy, he’s kind of dreading what’s on that tray. Cora has had an unholy obsession with mixing chocolate bars and gummy bears, lately. 

Once, in a momentary lapse of parental supervision, she managed to get the concoction into the microwave. 

He puts his phone down and, under the watchful gazes of his brood, inspects the tray.

It has a mug of tea on it and from the weight of the spoon, there’s a massive amount of honey clumped at the bottom. It smells like grass, which means it’s probably some healthy herbal concoction. Gross. But also healthy. Laura, definitely.

The plate, mercifully, only has sandwiches, assembled crookedly and with smiley faces cut into them. Derek’s contribution. He’s the only one allowed to handle pointy objects after the Pumpkin Carving Disaster of 2018. 

Cora’s contribution is a saucer filled with gummy bears that look like she only clutched them in her hands for maybe fifteen minutes instead of the usual half hour. They’re also lint free. Prime candy, really. 

“Thank you, guys. I’m sure with this stuff, I’ll be up and about again in no time!” He gives them a thumbs up. 

Laura snorts, seeing right through him. Thirteen going on thirty, that one. 

Derek shrugs. “We wanted to make chicken noodle soup, but Peter said no because he’s not letting you have soup in his bed.”

Their bed, Stiles thinks, pouting. It’s their bed. Spill a little coke and some crumbs _one time_ and feel the spousal disapproval forever. Hardass.

“And since we’re not going to set foot in that room and catch your plague, this is it,” Laura adds. “It’s only September, why the hell are you sick? We haven’t even had our flu shots yet and you’re already, like, dying.”

Stiles would take offense, but the fact that she’s able to joke about her parental figures biting the big one is actually giving him warm fuzzies. 

Healing. 

So good.

“Deserters,” he chides them, anyway, because he has an image to uphold. Then he coughs again and almost upends the tray, tea sloshing dangerously. 

“Wha’sat?” Cora demands.

“People who are going to the park,” Laura explains, giving Stiles a grin over the littlest’s head. “Right now. Get well! Don’t spill anything, Uncle Peter will exile you!”

With that she grabs her sister and they flounce off, hand in hand, Derek following with a sigh and a little finger wave.

He pops up after a moment. “Oh, don’t worry if you hear swearing. Uncle Peter’s trying to vacuum downstairs and he hasn’t figured out yet that there’s no bag in the vacuum because we pulled it out to save the legos last week.”

Then he’s gone.

A minute later, a car honks outside and the front door slams. 

Stiles takes a sip of his tea, grimaces at the healthy grass taste and chases it with a gummy bear. It makes him cough again.

He hates being sick. 

+

Ten minutes later, he hears some of the most colorfully violent swearing he’s been witness to in a good long while. Peter figured it out then.

Grabbing his phone, Stiles texts a quick _bags under the kitchen sink_.

He gets back a slew of rude emojis and buttonsmash.

+

His phone eventually gets too warm to hold comfortably and since Peter made an appearance after winning his battle with the household appliances and force fed him two aspirin, Stiles gives up and naps. 

The kids are happy with the McCalls and Isaac (without him), Peter is using the free time to do chores around the house (instead of snuggle his sick husband) and his head feels like someone stuffed it full of cotton and then banged it against the wall a few times. 

He wakes up an eternity later, choking on snot, blows his nose about fifteen times, rubs sand out of his eyes and then hacks for five minutes before flopping back on the bed and whining under his breath. 

“Wow. You’re a graceful patient,” Peter remarks from the doorway, where he apparently paused with a stack of laundry to watch Stiles in slow motion. 

Stiles stretches out both arms. “Have mercy. Drown me in the bathtub.”

Peter grimaces. “Hell no. Think of the mess. More tea?”

Stiles groans. 

“More tea it is.”

+

Alli pops in next, sitting crosslegged on Peter’s side of the bed, notebook and pen on her lap.

“You look pathetic.”

“I will sneeze on you.” He’s given up on trying to be not-sick by sheer willpower and resigned himself to his fate. 

“Unlike you guys, I already got my shot. Full immunity, bestie.”

He gives her the finger, then sniffles. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out the plot for my next book. Wanna be my sounding board?”

“I’ll cough when I don’t like something,” Stiles offers, and promptly starts wheezing. 

“Asshole.”

+

“Stiles?”

“Mhm?”

“Why does the grocery list say ‘everything’ in capital letters?”

“It also says ice-cream in normal letters,” Stiles counters.

“So, everything and ice-cream?”

“Yes. You were at the office, I was at the store, no-one has bought food in, like, a week.”

It’s actually a miracle the kids managed to scrounge up those sandwiches. Breakfast should have wiped out the kitchen. The only reason they didn’t go hungry yesterday was Pizza Night. 

Peter sighs. “I’ll be back in an hour.” A beat. “Maybe two. Call me if you die.”

+

The kids come back eventually and get fed with the fresh, plentiful food Peter lugged home like a good provider. Stiles is too tired and too far away to tease him about being a brilliant hunter and gatherer. Instead he sniffles, whines, and spends half an hour on Pinterest, hating everything. 

Eventually, he hears the TV switch on downstairs before Peter comes up with another tray. 

This time there’s pasta on it, cooked by an actual adult with access to the stove. Stiles is pretty sure it tastes delicious, but all his tastebuds register is snot. 

Gross.

Peter watches him eat while cleaning up his used tissues with a grimace. 

Stiles watches him right back. “Best hubby,” he offers, between bites and sniffles.

“The things I do for love.”

“Sorry I’m such a baby. I hate being sick.”

That earns him a fond look that he probably doesn’t deserve after upending their weekend plans and then whining in bed all day. 

“No-one likes it, Stiles.”

“But I hate it. And I’m a giant ass baby and you’re very patient with me.”

Peter drops the full trash bag by the door and sits down gingerly. “You’re not so bad. You just whine and nap. Worst sick person award goes to Talia.”

Stiles puts down his bowl and spoon. It’s rare that Peter will talk about his dead sister, even to her kids. “Yeah?”

He blows his nose, then turns back to Peter.

“Yeah. She used to actively follow anyone who was around and take her bad mood out on them. When we were kids, she once stalked me for a whole week, wrapped in a blanket, dropping her tissues everywhere, demanding I fetch and carry the whole time.”

That… sounds horrible. And very much like something he can imagine Laura doing, which is scary and makes him very grateful that the girl never gets sick. 

“What did you do?” 

A shrug. “Little stuff. She wanted me to fetch her book, I’d pull out the bookmark. Make her tea? Grab the wrong box, bring her fennel tea. Fetch tissues? Oops, we’re out, here have rough paper towels.”

Stiles’ giggles turn into a cough and then a sneeze and he hates everything, but when he looks up again, there’s a tissue being waved in his face and he knows it’s true love. 

“You’re perfect for me,” he declares eventually, when he can breathe normally again. 

“And once she was on her feet again,” Peter goes on, “I told our parents I’d seen her buying weed at school.”

Absolutely perfect.

+

The kids drop by to say goodnight one by one, waving from the doorway. Stiles waves back from his nest of blankets and dozes in between. He had another round of painkillers with dinner and he thinks he’s just going to stay horizontal until the morning. 

He kind of hopes that he’ll wake up healthy, but he knows better. This isn’t a bug or a cold, it’s the flu. He can always tell by the onset. Colds come with the sniffles first. The flu? For Stiles, it always starts with a cough and a fever. 

So he has two more weeks of feeling like shit to look forward to. 

Which means he needs to really, really call Maggie and the boys and try to figure out an emergency schedule for the store. Maybe get Laura to pitch in for a few hours after school. The little overachiever is already saving or her driver’s license and can always use the money. 

Tomorrow.

+

He wakes, dimly, when Peter joins him.

“Shoul’ take th’o room,” he slurs. 

No point in both of them getting sick. 

But Peter just climbs under the sheets and shuffles closer, slinging an arm over Stiles’ sweaty, gross, drippy self. 

“I’ll be fine.”

“Ge’sick.”

“I won’t get sick. I haven’t been running myself ragged for the past few weeks. And someone needs to monitor you in case you choke on your own snot.”

“Lov’you doo,” Stiles mutters, pretending the fact that Peter refuses to let him suffer alone doesn’t turn his insides almost as gooey as the fever he’s running. 

“Shut up and sleep, Typhoid Mary.”

“Pretty sure Mary wasn’sick. Jus’ a …carrier.”

“Just go the fuck to sleep, Stiles.”

Well then.

Okay. 

+


End file.
